Fishing was one of the earliest sectors to be subject to an EU Common Policy, bringing EU policy right onto the boats in hug edetail. What state could the industry be in Ten Years On?

Jim Thomson is rightly proud of his new thirty footer. Riding high in the dockside at Peterhead, the Annie is the newest addition to the Scottish inshore fishing fleet. Along with two other recently built vessels in the harbour, it symbolises the recovery of the industry today in 2020, after a period of forty years of decline.

Back in 1970, there had been 21,443 fishermen in the UK, with around one in seven of the workforce working part time. By the time of Britain’s EU renegotiations in 2010, there were just over 12,000.

Four in ten jobs at sea had been lost. But the pain was far more widespread, because for every sea-going job there were ten sustained on land maintaining the boats and processing what they caught. All told, accepting and implementing the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) had cost British coastal communities 115,000 jobs.

However, as Jim tells it, ‘As soon as we stopped being in the CFP, DEFRA immediately banned all dumping of fish at sea.  That change had an immediate economic effect, because £130 million of fish that would otherwise have been dumped at sea now was landed. This was just the initial one-off bonanza, though.  We brought a new system into play involving the ‘carry over’ of quota, negotiated at local community level. Where boats caught more than they were supposed to over the course of the season – and that was typically accidentally, as a result of fishing for other species – the catch would still be landed, weighed in order to add to the scientific understanding of the stocks, sold, and then reduced from the allowed catch limit for the following year.

‘And what we’ve seen, with no longer a third of fish being caught and dumped, the stock has slowly begun to replenish. It’s taken a long time and we’ve still got a long way to go to get to anywhere like the levels we had before we joined the EEC, but what’s happening now is quite clear. Letting the fish we used to dump grow to maturity doubles the stock size by the time they reach the age to spawn. I think we can say our territorial waters have scraped past a Grand Banks-style fisheries collapse, but only just.’

Jim Thomson’s new boat is a sign of the confidence that is re-emerging in 2020. ‘When we left the CFP,’ he says, ‘it meant that the industry was suddenly freed from much of the red tape burdens.  Cheaper fish makes a massive contribution to lower food prices and there’s a straight line back to the public paying less tax every year because the cost of food is factored into social security payouts. On top of that we’re still recouping millions of pounds every year by selling fish that, under the old rules, we had to dump, dead, back into the sea.

‘OK, we’re still a long way from recovering the £2.1 billion we lost when we had to surrender home waters rights, and even further from making up the £2.8 billion that was the total economic cost of the CFP while it was running.  But,’ and his eyes pass out to the gulls on the shoreline, ’come the next generation, when Annie is old and rusting and about to be cut up, you’ll see. The stocks will be back, the harbours will be filled, the foreign boats mostly gone, and the ports will be alive once more.’

We ask Jim what it had been like in the industry before 2010.

‘How long’ve you got?’ is his response.  We encourage him to dig into his experiences and memories.

‘Well, just look at the sums.’ he says, ‘You maybe don’t know that in 1973 British fishermen landed 1.1 million tons of fish.  By 2006 that’d dropped to just over half and it was mostly down to fishing by other EU members in what’d been our waters.  Incidentally, one big reason the Norwegians wouldn’t join the EEC in the early 70s was that they saw what would happen to their fishing industry if they did.  Our politicians either didn’t foresee that, or they did but reckoned it was a price worth paying.

Jim jabs at us with his forefinger, ‘Then there’s all that subsidy. Most of it went abroad by far. It’s ridiculous. Even the grants we got here, a lot went to boats that were owned by foreign companies.  They paid the grants by tonnage and though only one boat in fifty was foreign-owned, they were mainly the biggest ones so they actually made up a about a sixth of the total tonnage.  When the government tried to see to it that EU grants to Britain only went to UK-owned vessels, the foreign owners cried foul and got compensation through the courts.’

Jim’s warming to his task now.

‘And do you have any idea what we, in Britain, all paid for this?  I was reading a report last week when I heard you were coming. Well, it added £138 million to the social security budget, as the unemployed from the fleet and in the support industries had to go on benefits since there wasn’t any other work. Someone who did the sums reckons the fishing communities took another £27 million hit in social deprivation. Anglers faced the prospect of new legislation that even on a low estimate looked like £11 million in bureaucratic costs. £65 million went in support to foreign industries. £12 million was passed to the European Commission to buy licences, mostly for the Spanish to fish out third world waters. I could go on and on and on.

We fishermen were not the only ones who got hurt. Many of these costs carried across to the consumer, not least because we had less fish to sell in Britain.  The average household ended up paying £186 each year extra as a result. Don’t fret, I did the maths – £3.58 a week. And that on top of the prices added at the check-out through the Common Agricultural Policy.

‘But that financial burden wasn’t all. The CFP had a terrible ecological impact as well.  When I used to meet up with people based in Grimsby, Hull and Boston they used to tell me about some of the rules that bureaucrats would dream up; like the one that forced them to rub each individual fish’s belly to tell young herring and sprats apart.’ He chuckles, grimly, ‘ – quite a job when you’ve got  a full hold.

Jim wasn’t pulling our leg.  The Government’s own estimates from 2007 showed that for that one year alone, in just the North Sea area, and just looking at three types of fish, 23,600 tonnes of cod, 31,048 tonnes of haddock, and 6,000 tonnes of whiting were caught and then simply thrown back dead over the side of the boat, to drop to the sea floor and pollute the bed.  It meant we were dumping over three times the cod limit authorized by Brussels for British fishermen, six sevenths of the total for haddock, and two thirds of the permitted catch for whiting.  That 60,000 tonnes of dumped fish would have filled a 200 metre long supramax bulk carrier ship, or, to put it another way, it would have kept Billingsgate fish market stocked for two and a half years. We can put it in an even more dramatic way.  The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation put its total estimates of North Sea discards at up to 880,000 tonnes. It’s as much bulk as if we’d harpooned 200 sperm whales every month, and then just left them to float dead in the sea.’